Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Cancelling the standing meeting sent the next exception straight back to it
An Entrepreneur contributor's account of one cross-functional initiative argues that a weekly meeting survived because it had become the organisation's only working route for exceptions the standard process could not handle.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- A weekly meeting was set up to settle one unusual problem on a cross-functional initiative after the standard process gave the issue no clean route to resolution.
- Months later the original problem had been resolved, the meeting continued, and its agenda held a rotating set of exceptions that did not fit the normal process.
- Everyone involved agreed the session was consuming too much senior time, and someone proposed removing it from the calendar.
- The next unusual issue was pushed back through the normal route, stalled because the process had no path for cases outside its assumptions, and returned to the meeting.
- The owner of that issue was known throughout, and ownership by itself did not produce a route through the exception.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Deleting the session converts a visible, budgeted cost in senior hours into an unbudgeted one: work idles somewhere nobody is watching until it resurfaces.
- decision The choice in front of a leader is not how many recurring slots to cut but whether to define where a cross-boundary exception goes and who can settle it.
- constraint Org-chart remedies are limited here, since assigning an owner does not tell that owner how to move an issue the process never described.
- precedent Each exception the forum resolves makes it the default destination for the next one, so the case for keeping it strengthens the longer the routing gap stays open.
The test described in the account is cheap. Send the next unusual issue back down the standard path and watch whether it moves. In the case reported, it did not. One function could finish its part, but the issue crossed into territory the process did not define, and another team needed input that no standard handoff required [6]. It came back to the weekly meeting [5].
The article is careful to separate this from an ownership failure. Everyone may know exactly who owns the issue, and the normal path still leaves the owner without a way through once the case crosses a boundary or falls outside what the process assumed [8]. An owner still needs a route. The piece calls this an execution-routing problem that a calendar fix will not solve [9].
The cost sits in the interval between sessions: work waits, other tasks get sequenced around the wait, and senior time goes to exceptions that should not need it [10]. Cancelling the forum leaves that cost in place. It moves the wait from a scheduled slot to an open-ended one, because the issues stall elsewhere and come back [11][1]. The article does not name the organisation or put a number on the delay [2].
The obvious objection is calendar bloat: most standing meetings are exactly that, and the article concedes that meeting discipline is sometimes the real problem [15]. What it adds is a way to tell the two apart without a survey. If the exception clears the normal process, the meeting was habit. If it stalls and returns, the meeting was doing work the process cannot.
Sequence decides the outcome here. On this account, an organisation that removes the forum before defining where a cross-boundary exception goes, who can settle it, and how fast, will watch the same issues routed back, because people send uncertainty to whatever has already proven it can resolve it [16][13]. The evidence is one contributor's narrative of a single initiative, published under Entrepreneur's note that contributors' opinions are their own [17].
What the calendar shows is the symptom the article says leaders usually notice first: too many recurring sessions, the same senior people in them, growing agendas, and work idling until the next slot [14]. Trimming the list without building the route sends the same exception back to the same people.
What to watch
- Published data on how often cross-boundary exceptions recur, and how long they wait, would move this from one narrative to a measurable pattern.
- A documented case where an organisation defined an exception route and then retired the standing forum without the issues returning.
- Whether the contributor or Entrepreneur identifies the initiative, which would let the sequence of events be checked.